


in ventos vita recessit

by gloriouswhisperstyphoon



Series: death and all her friends [1]
Category: The Book Thief - Markus Zusak, The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:48:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26055211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloriouswhisperstyphoon/pseuds/gloriouswhisperstyphoon
Summary: The first time I meet her, she’s lying dead on a battlefield turned to mud and muck from the thunder of two armies crashing together, the sky turning a sickly blood red above us. She’s bleeding out from a wound in her back, delivered by the last person she would have expected, but that’s no matter.There have been others in history like her, but no one will ever be quite her.
Series: death and all her friends [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1915945
Comments: 22
Kudos: 71





	in ventos vita recessit

The first time I meet her, she’s lying dead on a battlefield turned to mud and muck from the thunder of two armies crashing together, the sky turning a sickly blood red above us. She’s bleeding out from a wound in her back, delivered by the last person she would have expected, but that’s no matter. There’s others on the battlefield that I have to deal with first. 

There’s many for me to collect here. Don’t worry - I’ll take all of them in turn. 

But as I take the woman lying beside her in my arms, the girl (and she’s still a girl at this point, all big eyes, wild hair and a heart that is slowly hardening itself against the world) stares at me, too still but her back straight, jaw set and strong. It’s not her time yet, though. Even as I look at her, the wound in her back is healing and the blood in her body is starting to pump again.

There have been others in history like her, but no one will ever be quite her. 

Ah, but we haven’t been introduced yet, have we? 

I’ll meet you all someday. Some sooner than others. 

Please be calm, that’s not a threat. I am not violent, nor am I cruel. I am merely a result. 

But we will meet one day, I will take you into my arms and carry you away to whatever lies beyond. 

I turn away to take the next soul in my arms, dead from a slashing axe blow, and I look at the girl again, firmly on her side of the river now, her skin as unmarked as it was the day she was born. The sky is almost sagging beneath the weight of what has happened. 

The girl is not dead yet.

It is not her time. It won’t be for a long time. 

\----

I see her for a long time, drifting in and out of the corner of my vision, a deathless demon rampaging through history. She’s still young yet, a strong warrior atop the greatest horse her people could offer, leading them to victory after victory, but I can see the horror curling at the corners of her mouth, even as her people sicken and fade, their names vanishing from history itself.

Everything fades and dies in the end.

The next time I see her, properly, in her full glory, the sky is a brilliant ultramarine blue, nary a cloud in sight and the world is the colour of bone. 

She’s standing on the ruined high wall of a doomed city, the ruins of their great cavalry force their ultimate undoing as they opened the great gates to admit them. It’s another long and busy day for me, an endless series of deaths in the name of a single woman, but that’s what the books will say. 

It’s not for me to judge. 

But even despite everything, I’m still drawn to her, as ageless as she was at her first death, touched by grief and death as she is in this moment, struggling against the grip of stronger men, their white clothes stained with blood and she’s breathless and hoarse. 

The walls are stained red, almost purple in some parts. In the right light, it could almost be beautiful, with the play of colours. 

But there’s the broken body of a young boy lying at the bottom of the crowning peak of his father’s towers as he lets out his last breath. I walk up to him as gently as I can and loosen his soul from his body. 

He’s brokenly crying out for her as I take him with me, his eyes looking up to where she’s standing, hanging limply amidst the crowd there, after she’s screamed out all her rage and sorrow. I can feel her eyes boring their way into me, accusatory and full of pain.

I can’t do anything about them. I am merely a herald for harsher messages. 

The boy’s cries tear at my heart as we walk away from her. 

\---

The sky is blue, streaked with vibrant colour when I see her again, her hands stained with blood while another woman is sobbing. 

They’re both like her, as ageless as she ever was, but not as brightly magnetic as her. 

There’s something different about her now as I come for the dying man.

He’s not mine just yet. 

Sometimes I can arrive a little early, or people can cling to life longer than expected, but I’ll still take them when there is nothing left to give.

She’s grown, I realise, while I wait for the man. The lines around her eyes are softer, her face more inclined to break into a smile. She’s not crying, right now, though, her face lost and blank while she clutches the dying man’s hand whose body is no longer healing, his blood leaking out between her fingers onto the dark loam below. 

I’ve often wondered if that helps. 

The man’s soul is light when I take him, so maybe it does. 

His mouth falls open as he dies, a last joke before he goes.

He meets me with his back straight and an easy smile, before he glances back at the women, one’s face tear streaked and the other’s carefully blank, before a woman’s high voice starts singing, an old language that almost no one can remember.

Almost.

There’s still her. 

When I leave them, the women are leaning on each other, before her eyes drift just to the side to where I’m standing. 

Her singing rings in my ears for long after I leave. 

There seems to be a little eclipse when he dies, a recognition of a soul’s departure. I’ve seen many of them.

More than I care to remember. 

\----

There’s others in history, of course, more deathless ones. I don’t know how they occur, or what takes their gifts away in the end, but they’ve always been there in the background, brilliant and brave in equal measure.

The next ones to emerge are the men lying dead amidst the carnage of a broken city, their swords in each other’s bodies. It’s a long several days of work for me then, carrying souls out from the ruin of their holy city, but I don’t take those two with me. 

It’s always slow the first time, but they rise again, only to charge at one another again, hacking at each other again and again in a fruitless fight.

There are so many young men who have convinced themselves that running at each other is war. That’s not what it is. War is young men running at me.

I sigh and gather up the other souls around them while the cycle begins anew.

I cannot change the world, even as much as I wish to.

\---

I’m with her on that day with a slate grey sky shot with white clouds like broken marble when they drag her companion, lover, friend, whatever it is, away from her, and consign her to the sea. I can’t take the woman, no matter how I try. Her soul is glued down, even as she dies and wakes again, a brutal cycle that will repeat until that final moment of either escape or release. 

There’s not much I can offer for her, the victim of fate, or misfortune, or injustice, or whatever other people will call it. I cannot say what people will remember it is. I’m always finding humanity at their best and their worst, with all their ugly and their beauty intermingled.

I see her leaving her cell into a field where a score of men lie dead at the hands of the men that came to rescue her. Her hair is still lying on the ground where she had torn it out in her rage and grief, and fading lines on her face where she had raked her own nails over it, the blood drying even as I looked and the broken fingers from where she had struggled against the chains healing in the work of a moment.

Her scream makes me jump, this noise of anguish and loss, before she takes a moment to dry the tears that are cutting through the grime on her face.

She’s grown beautiful, but only in the way that loss and pain and rage make one beautiful, her face too-sharp lines and hard eyes. 

I wanted to crouch down, to say, “I am so sorry, child.”

But that is not allowed. 

Instead, I stood there a while and watched her as she dropped to the ground and howled. 

It is all that I could do. 

\---

There’s another that emerges after some time. 

A deserter hanging from a barren tree while a raven perches on his shoulder and starts to peck at him. Even from here, I can see the emptiness that follows in his wake, the dark eyes that seem as if they have swallowed the horror and darkness of this battlefield and the hunger and pain that follows in this army’s wake. 

“Have you come for me?” he whispers through broken lips. 

I can’t reply, but somehow I’m not surprised that this one, of all of them, made up of shards of broken glass and rage, is able to talk to me, even as he’s struggling against the noose about his neck.

I don’t take him, even as he cries out for me to.

Not yet. 

\---

They’re in the corner of my eye, always, this newfound team, darting through wars and conflicts like tiny glimmering fish that surface for a single moment. I’m always there, through everything. 

I’m there to pick up the innocents they tried so hard to save, just as much as I am there for the soldiers who fought for what they thought was right, or to feed their families, or for whatever other reason they might have had.

The world is a hard place. 

I try to stop being shocked about it.

But she’s there, as hard and as brittle as iron, unyielding and unbending as she was on that first battlefield. 

Perhaps it’s inappropriate for me to have gotten attached to these people as I have, but how can I not?

Yes, I am often reminded of them, in those liminal moments where they float between my world and that of the living, before they are healed and rise anew, but this has always been my lot. I watched the places that we intersect and marvel at what she has achieved. 

It is the best that I can do.

\----

It’s years before I see another one, this one far brighter and younger than the ones that came before her, this one beneath a brilliantly golden sky glowing against the stone walls outside. 

She’s dying on a dirt floor, cherries of blood welling up from the gash in her neck, while those around her are yelling for help, while her wide eyes stare and stare at the empty sky. 

When I arrived, I could still hear the echoes of children’s laughter from just moments earlier, the smiles like salt and fading fast, before the ripples of gunshots tore everything apart. 

Then, the single bright flicker of a blade rippling towards her neck. 

My work was simple and fast, but she was still there when I was finished, the wound on her neck slowly mending itself, as her hand reached up to try and clutch the cross at her neck. In hindsight, I think she had realised it - that her old life was over and that there was nothing left of it.

I carry legions of stories in my vast pockets and each is extraordinary in its own way, a tiny drop in a limitless ocean. 

But her story - her story echoes through time and it brings to mind a young brave warrior on a battlefield beneath a sky like blood. 

She’ll be spectacular. 

\---

The last time I see her, the sky is brilliant and warm above us, shades of orange and red and pink all melding together in a soft morass. 

I make a point of taking my time with her. 

Oh, I’ve appeared to her before this point, in the darkness of a church with men desperate to capture her, in the sunny living room as she is betrayed by the dying deserter I saw so long ago, so many other tiny moments. 

After all, it’s hard to avoid someone when they carry war in their wake. 

But this is the last time, and it deserves respect. Death, after all, has a heart. 

The men from that burning city, the deserter, the woman from the desert, they’re all leaning over her body, clutching at her hand. The deserter raises his eyes to meet me, nodding his head in silent acknowledgement. All of us will meet again in due course.

But I’m not here for them. 

She’s standing tall and strong to greet me, as she ever was in life, and her face is open and gentle. She had always worn the weight of the years like a millstone on her back, her eyes hard and burning. But now, she looks worn and tired, new lines on her face that were not there mere years earlier.

Despite everything, she’s had the chance to grow old. There’s regret and pride in her eyes in equal measure. 

She’s tired and broken, but her soul is light as I take her hand.

Her voice is raspy when she finally speaks, sparing a quick glance back. “I always imagined you differently.”

There isn’t much comfort I can give as I lead her away. I have to say, though, as much as it has broken my heart, I was, and am still glad that I was there.


End file.
